The law is not for the individual person, but for organisations that develop the OS. So they would go to Arch linux org and start threatening them with huge fines, unless they do something here. And all the headache of how exactly to implement this would fall on arch developers. At which point I suspect they would go the same route as Midnight BSD and just forbid the use in California, because as you rightly said it is impossible to implement age verification in DIY distro.

Not even that, it’s more expensive than natural gas and you can’t even use it in a combined cycle plant. So you pay more and get less energy for it. You don’t even need to mention pollution to show it is a terrible fuel.

You can, but it requires some setup in the desktop mode. I guess some people do not bother or don’t know you can do that.

So what was the original saying? As I see it, this phrase is wrong no matter how you look at it. Because all ram is used at all times, for example if you have 32GB of free ram, the kernel will use all of it as a page cache to speed up the file system. The more free ram you have the more files can be cached, avoiding access to the disk when you read them.

This phrase is just plain wrong. Unused ram is used for the page cache by the kernel. You must always have some ram free or else the whole system will not operate without a page cache. Larger page cache allows to cache more files from the file system.

I think you missed the point. Imagine 2 devices, device A has a chip with flash memory that contains a binary blob with firmware. Device B doesn’t have built-in flash storage so it requires the driver to load the same binary blob during boot. Both devices are reprogrammable and both contain the same closed source firmware. However device A would be allowed but device B would not. From my point of view they are the same device. The fact that you don’t know how to reprogram device A doesn’t make it more or less proprietary.

We don’t use them in my project, I only added an exception for ©®™ and such. You can easily whitelist any character range you need. My command looks like this:

- (! grep -r -I -P '[^\x{00}-\x{7f}©®™°]' src)

I just made a CI pass to forbid non ASCII characters in the code. Found a lot of em dashes :(

I agree, we should push more to get the open and standardized API for these accelerators, better drivers and better third party software support. As long as the manufacturers keep them locked and proprietary, we won’t be able to use them outside of niche copilot features no one wants anyway.

No, it will not save any power at all. The power is only consumed during switching, so when some module is properly clock gated, it will not consume any power. There are many parts of the chip that are dark, for example the full CPU core could be disabled for various reasons and it does not affect power consumption when it’s dark. Maybe you know the Steam Deck, it is a battery operated device with the best power efficiency in its class. But what people don’t know is that it has more than 20% of its chip area disabled, as it relates to stereoscopic displays, because the same exact chip is also used by some AR or VR goggles, I forgot the name.

Also in general the modern chips are more limited by thermal rather than space. So realistically, even if you remove the NPU, you won’t be able to place anything high power there anyways, maybe you can put a couple hundred K of sram for cache in its place, but it won’t matter much in the end.